Sweetness (13 page)

We had running backs at Jackson State who were bigger than Walter, who were stronger than Walter. But as I learned, fifty percent of talent is height, is weight, is strength, and is speed. The other fifty percent—the most important fifty percent—is that the youngster has to want to be a superb football player. And Walter had that compelling desire to lift weights, to condition himself, to run a riverbank up and down, to run the stadium steps. After practice he’d go eat dinner, then come back to the gym. He didn’t play the game for the crowd appeal or the attention. He played for the love.

CHAPTER 6

JACKSON STATE

THROUGHOUT HIS BLISSFULLY PLACID BOYHOOD, WALTER PAYTON WAS NEVER one to make trouble or start a fight. Oh, maybe he and his pals would steal a couple of melons from a field, or perhaps he’d drive thirty miles above the speed limit in his daddy’s truck. But when it came to conflict, and especially conflict over civil rights and desegregation, Walter was nowhere to be found. When, in April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, the blacks of Columbia held a march from Jefferson High School to City Hall. Not only did Walter refuse to participate, he didn’t even attend as an observer.

At Jackson State, however, Walter encountered an entirely new perspective on race. Although he had spent much of his summer living on the Jackson campus, with the arrival of the 4,800-member student body for the start of the fall semester came an eye-opening education on what it was to be black, proud,
and
vocal. In his hometown, Walter had watched and learned from his elders, who survived by shuffling past whites with eyes lowered and mouths shut. If one addressed a white person, it was always with a deferential “sir” or “ma’am.” The ideas of black pride and black power weren’t ideas at all.

Now, however, at a school where 98 percent of the student body was black, all Walter Payton had to do was pick up a copy of the
Blue and White Flash
, Jackson State’s monthly student newspaper, to understand how his world—and
the
world—was changing. “Before it’s too late, you had better start thinking for yourself,” wrote Jonathan Grant in a November 1971 editorial titled “Awaken Black Youths.” “Our fore-fathers [
sic
] were treated cruel, treated like animals, sold like cattle, drug up and down the streets, hung by the neck from an oak tree, tarred and feathered, and burned at the stake. Will you awaken, or will you let this kind of thing perpetuate continuously? Are you an animal or a human being? Are you a first class citizen, or a second class citizen?”

Grant’s piece ran alongside another column, “A Black Man’s Hope,” that began with the sentence, “I am a man of a darker color. My oppressor will not let me go any further.”

“We were all about making a statement,” said Coolidge Anderson, an editor at the
Flash
. “I wanted to be a revolutionary in the movement. We didn’t hate whites, but we hated what segregation had done.”

Less than a year and a half before Walter’s official enrollment, the Jackson State campus was home to great tragedy. On May 14, 1970, Phillip Gibbs, a twenty-year-old Jackson State student, and James Green, a seventeen-year-old senior at nearby Jim Hill High School, were shot and killed by state police during an on-campus protest over race relations. The altercation began when police mistook the sound of a dropped glass bottle for the unloading of a round. “They opened fire on the girls’ dormitory,” said Milton Webb, a Jackson State freshman at the time. “Students were in front of the dorm, innocently standing there, and the police started shooting away.”

“When you’re shot at by the police and state troopers for thirty seconds with automatic rifles, you don’t think about much except surviving,” said Eddie Payton, who witnessed the event. “I was out there bullshitting with some other football players, and when we saw the state troopers come we just turned to get back to our dorm. By the time we reached the dorm the whole sky was lit up from gunfire.”

Despite repeated assertions from law enforcement that race had nothing to do with the killings, most of Jackson State’s students and faculty found the explanation implausible. Even fifteen months later, as Walter and his fellow freshmen arrived, the pain from that day had yet to subside. “You don’t get over something of that magnitude,” said John Peoples, the college president. “Not in a month, not in a year, maybe not ever.”

Were Walter Payton compelled, he could have walked over to the Alexander Residence Center to run his finger over a bullet hole. He could have followed the lead of the small band of students who changed their last names to X. He could have grown out his Afro, penned angry editorials for the
Blue and White Flash
, marched across campus in one of the ongoing protests over the mistreatment of blacks throughout the state of Mississippi.

Any such acts, however, would have been out of character. Because Walter Payton, eighteen years old and as nice and agreeable a kid as one could find, was attending college in Jackson for three simple reasons: to play football, meet girls, and receive a quality education.

In that order.

Had Walter Payton been a member of the Kansas State student body, he would have found himself on one of the nation’s more beatific campuses, surrounded by grass and trees and dignified brick buildings with a Harvard-esque feel.

Jackson State was no Kansas State. Located on the western side of Mississippi’s capital, a mere five-minute drive from downtown, the 125-acre campus was your prototypical city school, an uninspired gray and pewter in color, with patches of green tossed in amongst concrete bleakness. A road, J. R. Lynch Street, divided the campus in half, providing students with the steady hum of cars and trucks passing through. Though far from the ugliest college in America, Jackson State’s physical beauty (as well as the funding it received from the state) paled in comparison to Mississippi’s prominent white schools: Ole Miss, Mississippi State, and Southern Miss.

The football facilities were no better. The team’s locker room was located inside a decrepit converted army barracks that had been built during World War II. The floor was rotting wood, the walls decaying drywall.

Not that Walter particularly cared. Jackson State quickly felt like home, especially when he was assigned to share quarters with his brother, Eddie, and his best friend from Columbia, Edward “Sugar Man” Moses, also a freshman running back. The three were placed in a second-floor room in Sampson Hall, the school’s football dormitory. There was one regular bed and a bunk, two small bedrooms with a common area, and a bathroom located down the hall. As a star senior with the Tigers, Eddie possessed enough sway to have his own room or, at most, one upper-class roommate. “But I wanted to show Walter the ropes and take care of him,” Eddie said. “He was my little brother, and this was going to be a new experience for him.”

Despite lingering sibling resentment, Eddie made Walter’s early collegiate adjustment significantly easier. He talked to him about which classes to take, where to hang out, who to trust, and who not to trust. Their mother, Alyne, made regular drives up to see her boys, and when the season started she would arrive Saturday mornings with fresh-baked treats. (In Eddie and Walter’s years at the school, Alyne never missed a home game.) “I was feeling right at home,” Walter once wrote. “Eddie was a great kid with just the right personality for a football player—maybe better than mine. He was the type who believed he could do anything if he really tried.” Though far from a wallflower, Walter couldn’t compete with his brother’s social ease. He watched in amazement as Eddie lingered in front of Sampson Hall, heckling people as they passed. “If he saw a carload of girls to flirt with,” Walter wrote, “he’d walk right out there and hold up traffic for half a block to talk with them.” Eddie also introduced Walter to the large oak tree positioned approximately three feet from the window in their room. When Hill imposed curfews, often stationing himself at the Sampson Hall front entrance (Hill was fond of a cologne appropriately named “Trouble,” and players could smell him as they snuck back in), Eddie, Walter, and Sugar Man would grab ahold of the tree, use its branches to scale down the trunk, and indulge in a night on the town at Nita’s or the Doll’s House or one of the other clubs on Lynch Street. “We’d go out to dinner, go out to the park, get some girls, and do some making out. Then we could come back in and go up,” Eddie said. “Security would never stop us because of who we were, but then one day Coach Hill found out what we were up to.”

“And,” Eddie said, “he immediately had all the branches removed from the tree.”

In Columbia, a young black man always had to watch what he said, and who he said it to. But here, on the all-black campus, Walter felt at ease. The vast majority of his teammates hailed from identical small-town backgrounds—poor and black, forced to gaze downward when whites passed, praised by whites only for their athletic gifts. They knew what it was to be called “nigger” and “coon,” and they could relax in the knowledge that, in college, nobody uttered such things.

Walter’s social adjustment to college was smooth, and the first few days were filled with the euphoric giddiness of a new adventure. Yet the freedoms that came with life away from home were mere mirages.

Soon Walter would get to know a force of nature known as Bob Hill.

He was born in 1935 on an eight-acre farm in Tippo, Mississippi, a nondescript rural town with dirt roads and dirt driveways and dirt aspirations for the black kids who filled its streets. Robert Hill loved sports as a boy, but had little reason to think they’d take him anywhere beyond the bathroom sink where his grandma, Lillie Vance, patched up his bloody knees and elbows. Besides, most of his time was devoted to picking cotton in the family fields—his all-butguaranteed future occupation. “I could pick three hundred pounds of cotton easily, and people admired that,” said Hill, who was born out of wedlock and raised by Lillie. “We didn’t have a school bus, and barely had a school. We had schools in churches in different areas, but you only went until eighth grade. Then, if you wanted to go to high school, you moved in with a relative or friend who had one nearby. Otherwise, you started your long life as a worker.”

Come September 1949, young Bob, age fourteen, followed the annual late-summer routine of plucking thick white clumps of cotton. He was one of hundreds of Tippo blacks working the field; one of hundreds of Tippo blacks who loathed the bleakness of the task but knew no alternative. “I didn’t particularly mind picking the cotton,” he said, “but the chopping it, and picking the grass out, and spacing it—just terrible. You had to make sure you didn’t cut too much of it down, and if you did you might get a whuppin’.” That October, in what would become a life-altering decision, his grandma Lillie insisted he move to nearby Charleston to live with his other grandmother, Janie Hill, and attend Tallahatchie Agricultural High School, an all-black facility that guided its students toward blue-collar careers. “Boy, was I ever happy,” he said. “When we started picking cotton the weather was good and the cotton was opening. But it began raining mid-October, and I guess my grandma figured enough was enough—let’s get this kid doing something more meaningful.”

Bigger, stronger, and rougher than most of his peers, Bob immediately caught the eye of Joe Allen, the school’s principal and head football coach. Until that point, he had never seen a football. “They insisted I come out for the team, so I did,” he said. “They gave me a jersey, and I finally figured out how to put the jersey on. Then I jogged out to practice with my helmet on. Everyone started laughing and teasing, because I had the helmet on backward.”

Hill struggled to learn the game, and caught his fair share of beatings from Allen, an impatient man who kicked and punched those who failed to execute. The following year a new coach, David Alford, held the job, and moved Hill from wide receiver to running back. He immediately took to the position. “It was the contact,” he said. “I grew up on a farm, herding the cows, working with the cattle, riding horses, and I liked physical activity.” Hill’s grandmothers, however, feared for his life, and demanded “Junior” (as they called him) drop sports to focus on schoolwork. “I had to slip out and play,” he said. “My aunt Bessie was a schoolteacher, and she came up for one of the games. The other team kicked off, and I was back receiving. And I got the kickoff. It was an old dusty field. I got tackled by five or six people, and the dust is all over my face. She ran out on the field screaming, ‘Junior! Junior! Junior! Come on! You see why I don’t want you to play!’ She didn’t know anything about the game, because she lived out in rural parts and we didn’t know anything about football. All the guys laughed.”